M. Night Shyamalan doesn't only have a long name, but his most acclaimed
movie "The Sixth Sense" was made a long time ago, only followed by
minor and big disasters like "Lady in the Water" and "Unbreakable". He
may isn't the best director out there and not all of his endings were
unexpected, but he is a man who tries to make a difference in Hollywood.
None of his movies were industry standards and even though many of
them are bad were created with a love for details. This time he didn't
wrote the story by himself and used instead the loved animation series
avatar. The movie was a flop and won't get a sequel, but was it really
that bad?

The movie
stays true to its source material, which doesn’t work well. The pacing is all
of the place and there are drastical cuts to shorten the length to fit the
format. We have a long introduction, which is necessary. We learn more about
the avatar, the hero of the movie and that there are people after him. From
then on it gets worse. We get to glimpses of the world in short introductions
of badly created sets that last for only 3 minutes each time. He chooses that mechanic
instead of focusing on one of the side stories. This way we don’t fully
understand what's happening and we just don’t care. There is no tension to see
a small village, some random dudes attacking it and being saved in a merely of
5 minutes? That goes on for some while so really each part of the original series
gets used, without its necessary to the overall story. It would have been better to capture the meaning behind the story, instead of trying to fit it 1:1 into a full length movie.

Finally
after the mess of the middle part we come to the epic conclusion of the first
season and see the mighty city of water benders getting attacked by the fire
nation. It could be a historic moment like it was in The Lord of the Rings –
The Tow Towers, as the Uruk-Hai forced their way over the wall of Helms Depp,
but it isn’t like that. The Water Bender can’t defend themselves, the walls are
taken in some minutes and overall the epicness is not there. Some People
standing right and left but it doesn’t feel big, more like two small villages
clashing each other. The same
goes for the choreography of the fights. They are slow and look more like a
dance, with no tension building up at all. In the series the bending was much
faster and spectacular, but probably cuts due the expensive effects they
needed. If that was really the cash then less would be more. Two or three
interesting bending fights would be better than these many meaningless ones.
Another point which wasn’t good are the actors themselves. Some of them are
simply bad, others struggles with their bad one liners and the rest doesn’t
fit. In a cartoon about Asian culture we don’t see anyone of that race, just a
lot of Caucasians pretending to be Buddha priest and a lot of Indians, which
both don’t fit well together. Another compromise to bring it to Hollywood I guess. The only
good thing in this movie are the effects, which look stunning. Be it the
floating elements, animals or scenery was made with great detail and fitting
for the movie. It’s the only jewel in the mud you will find and means this try
wasn’t successful for Shyamalan either. The bad thing is that the movie had a
lot of potential and cuts the chance of ever getting a successor, which was
hinted at all the time. If you want to see the story, then I can only recommend
the original series. You can skip some of the filler episodes and have a better
movie than this adaption wanted to be.

What did you think of the movie? Was it good to stay true to the original material?

1 Kommentare:

Woah! It was good to know about this movie. I am looking forward to it. I just hope I find it on Netflix now. I just can’t live without watching movies and online shows. I am actually looking for some nice shows by Andy Yeatman as I have heard a lot about it.